Earl Norman

The Earl Norman books are becoming extremely rare, and publishers don’t seem to be interested in reprinting the series. The only way some of us may ever have all the stories is for collectors to scan and type the stories into PDF to swap with other collectors. I have already completed PDFs of HANG ME IN HONG KONG and KILL ME IN ROPPONGI. I am working on KILL ME IN YOKOSUKA. If other collectors would do the same for some of the other books, we could eventually have PDFs of all ten books. Why not help? I can be contacted at fadingshadows40@gmail.com

Saturday, March 29, 2014

The Flower Drum Song

The Flower
Drum Song by C.Y. Lee. The generation
gap, the age-old story of the battle between the old generation and the new. In
this case, it is San Francisco’s Chinese population during the late 1940s and
early ‘50s. The House of Wang is headed by Old Man Wang and his sister-in-law,
Madame Tang. They believe in the old ways, but Wang’s sons are learning the new
ways of America, and the two generations crash. To make matters worse, the
older son, Wang Ta is troubled by sexual desires, and searching for a girl to
marry, while his father and Madame Tang plan an arranged marriage between
families. Things come to a head when a father and daughter team of street
musicians land on the doorstep. May Li and her songs capture Wang Ta’s heart,
but it goes against the arranged plans of his elders.

The first half of this 244-page novel was slow and
boring, but picks up interest in the second half, when May Li and her father
enter the story. The novel has received much praise from the Asian community,
as it gives a picture of the times by a Chinese-American author in 1957. To be
honest, a decade earlier, 1947, Emily Hahn, a Chinese-American woman who
achieved success in the early days of 1900s, by obtaining an engineering
degree, as well as becoming a professional writer and independent woman of the period,
wrote a more powerful story. “Miss Ann of Shanghai” tells the story of a more
turbulent time in Chinese history. Other novels, although not written by
Asians, yet tell their story in a more powerful setting: “Sayonara” by James
Michener, whose Japanese-American wife, Mari Yoriko Sabusawa actually did the
research for the book. She had been put in a California internment camp after
the attack on Pearl Harbor, yet eventually completed her education, achieving
much success as a Japanese-American woman before she and Michener married. “The
World of Susie Wong” by Richard Mason, about a Chinese prostitute in Hong Kong
is also a powerful tale about a Chinese woman. There have been many others
that, in my opinion, are far better novels than “The Flower Drum Song”. Nor can
I imagine the Wang family as the typical Chinese immigrant. Most likely a
millionaire when he arrived, his children are treated to the best life money
can offer them. Wang Ta, the eldest son, unable to find work befitting his
status, goes back to college for another 8 years to become a doctor. He already
has one degree. I was more sympathetic to the street musicians, May Li and her
father, who earned seven dollars from May Li’s singing and dancing, to pay for a
dollar’s room in a bedbug infested room. The average immigrant probably arrived
in America with a dream, a skill, and the clothes on their back, not a million
dollars. But, again, the second half of the novel saves the book from a failing
rating. All the first half does is show the reader the difference between
generations at the time, which seems to be played out in every generation, and I
didn’t find very entertaining.